On Helmut Kravitz, Briefly

I just realized something about the mythology that I misspoke about before. For the sake of full disclosure, I feel these sorts of little details are important. I've been talking about the Undigestible Man as though he spawned the mythology, but that isn't entirely the case. There is another character who predates the Undigestible Man, who has been around far longer - long enough, in fact, to have retired from the mythological spotlight long ago; long enough to have been relegated to a chapter or two (and many footnotes) in the mythology's own history textbooks about itself.

His name is Helmut Kravitz. Helmut is my mythology's own Dostoevsky, the Soviet-born political dissident who thwarted his oppressors and flaunted his demons by producing a long-running satirical comic strip called "The Penguin Republic." The Penguin Republic has an entire world unto itself, and has logged many hours of obsession in my brain. The previously mentioned bizarre website project deals mostly with this world (www.thepenguinrepublic.com), but it's also taken more extreme measures, including 3/4 of a 1980's era video game that I toiled over one long summer (this is actually the one aspect of the mythology that might have traction with other people outside of my own mind - I passed a demo of the game around my dorm a couple years ago, and still get requests fairly often for its completion).

But Helmut existed before the Penguin Republic needed an author. His first appearance was in eighth grade, the tragic figure of an ill-conceived novel I tried to write for an English class final project. The story itself was pretty weak, and even then was dominated by the unhealthy fascination with Jungian psychology that has persisted throughout the mythology's tenure. There is a planet of mysterious origin dangling nearby the Earth, hidden just behind the moon. It was actually created by the military (or something), as a psychological weapon of mass effect (I guess?). The hook: its terrain is psychologically malleable, capable of manifesting a person's subconscious thoughts into reality (sound familiar? I could probably rename this blog "Improbable Manifestations of the Jungian Subconscious," and perhaps I will yet). And yes, as expected, the people who created the planet did not anticipate the full repercussions of its powers.

I can't remember now what it was called, and I only wrote the first fourty or so pages, mostly involving the landing party facing hideous parades of their worst fears in city squares. Come to think of it, there were also blob-like human things that were meant to just be thoughts - always milling around in marketplaces and along busy thoroughfares. I never connected them to their shadow-people counterparts until now. Anyway, I got stuck pretty quickly, because I was mostly concerned with building up to the awesome ending: after facing wave after wave of Jungian foe, driving most of the crew to isolation or suicide, there are only two characters left: the hero, who I don't remember (his name might have been Jonathan), and Helmut Kravitz, the sole survivor of the previous expedition to the planet. Helmut is kind of the prototype of the Undigestible Man here, having endured enough in life to be unaffectable and perpetually unaffected. Except that he is not undigestible, but precisely the opposite: deciding at last to confront the enemy directly, Helmut is actually consumed by the planet, and by giving his life saves that of the hero (who is instantly forgettable).

(To be totally honest, I think the whole premise of the novel was unintentionally ripped off of an episode of Red Dwarf, in which the same exact thing happens, minus the ending. This feels good to admit; I think this is therapeutic.)

I liked the name alot, and so Helmut Kravitz has persisted through the mythology's many iterations. In times where I've tried to think about a world with less profoundly depressing conclusions, Helmut often serves as the thankless character who bears the brunt of dark thoughts for everyone else. For example, I've often thought that the crew of the Remote Fishing Resort were obsessed with Helmut Kravitz's work. There is a shack floating out at sea, far away from the resort, where one crewman at a time is isolated for several weeks, only interacting occasionally with ambitious guests who've gone too far out of the bay and need more bait or gasoline (this was an actual function at the fishing resort I worked at). The big dare while whittling away the endless hours in the outpost, already fragile and alone, is to read Helmut Kravitz's The Life and Times of the Undigestible Man, which tells of the titular character's descent to the center of the world, where he finds the controls to the planet and drives the Earth into the sun.

I promise that there are not-dark aspects of the mythology as well, but these are the things I'm the most anxious to let go and finally be rid of. Sometime soon I will get into the Fast Food Ambassador, and then I'm likely to ramble on about Time until I'm out of it.

The Bottom of the Ocean

After leaving the oil rigs my life changed dramatically, as in, it went back to roughly how it had been before I worked on the oil rigs. At first this meant a near-complete deflation of the mythology; I had other things on my mind, and was more than happy to leave the dark destiny of the Undigestible Man behind me. This lasted for about four months. I think the first relapse after that was pretty significant, because it really set the precedent for persistent obsession over this thing. It also underscored the reality that the mythology is not nearly as coherent as it would like to be. It would like to pretend that there's one big story building here, with precisely attuned elements being added all the time. But you can see for yourself.

The next salient aspect of the mythology is the Remote Fishing Resort, chosen likely because about four months after I left the rigs I took a job working on a semi-remote fishing resort. The job itself wasn't nearly the perfect picture of hell that the rigs had been - it was in the middle of the summer, I spent most days on a dock drinking coffee (with only a few hours each day devoted to gutting fish and mopping blood out of speed boats) and the other crew were really cool guys. We talked a lot about film and history and, for some reason, how much we all really hated the guests. This was a weird aspect of the job that I took for granted at the time, but it wasn't just our resort. The same company that owned us also owned about seven other places, and I got the impression from guys who had worked other resorts that just about anybody who was put in the position of helping fat Texan guys catch large salmon ended up completely resenting them for it. It was like we all shared some reverence for the symbolic purity of the ocean, and felt that we too were being abused when these ungrateful mammoths raped the sea of its precious resources for sport and glory. Whenever one wasn't in ear-shot, every crew-member referred to the guests as "chows," presumably because they chow on things (like food and resources? I don't really know).

The thing that really got my symbolism-mongering going was the rock cod. Because the fisheries around our resort were drastically over-fished, the chows would often come in from a day's fishing empty-handed. This led them to occasionally give up on fishing twelve-feet deep (where the salmon typically are) and let their lines spool out so that they were trolling the bottom of the bay. And by this method they would sometimes come back with gross, ugly fish like rock cod - inedible, smelly, and really really old. These things were basically dinosaurs, built like tanks to last forever doing hardly anything, so a couple feet worth of rock cod meant about three hundred years of life. Incubating since the industrial revolution just to be gaffed by some chow named Dwayne who has a personal policy of "I catch it, I bonk it" (don't you see how miserable these cretins were?) Other times they would catch even weirder stuff. We had a guy on our crew who had a degree in marine biology and had lived in the region his entire life, and a couple times he had no clue what he was looking at, some of the fish were so ancient and prototypical. They were like archetypes, milling around at the bottom of the collective unconscious.

And that is precisely what about them I became obsessed with.

The fishing resort has had a hard time fitting in with the overall mythology. Sometimes the Undigestible Man works at the fishing resort before he goes on to the rigs (and subsequently finds the controls to the planet), but in general the resort doesn't serve any special purpose other than to highlight the similarities between weird ancient fish at the bottom of the ocean and the concept of archetypes milling around in the collective unconscious - in both cases, just waiting for ill-advised fisherman to go hunting after them, not knowing what they're getting into by doing so. Also in both cases, providing me with an obsession I can hardly articulate, let alone express in a way that will help anyone else care. I could perhaps write a short story for some kind of Jungian Appreciation Society, but even then, there are better Jungian premises to work with.

There is one set of scenes that stick in my mind: The Fish Master who runs the resort, knows everything about fish, hates the chows, never goes fishing himself - he's a pretty haunted guy (not unlike the Undigestible Man), and has made some pretty bad choices in his life, but we have no idea what. The resort is his life now, his permanent exile. At the crack of dawn every morning he goes down to the dock and peers out over the bay, watches the sun peer out above the darkness. One morning he sees a shadowy figure, almost human-like, appear on the horizon, walking across the water towards him. He freaks out and runs back to his cabin, afraid of something he doesn't understand.

A little later on he's called down to the docks because a guest has caught something really strange. He'd been trolling the bottom of the ocean out of boredom, and after a drawn-out fight had dragged in something weird and ancient and really large. It's vaguely green with webbed arms and legs, but, much more disturbingly, its rough dimensions are somewhat human. Its eyes are dead, but otherwise resemble human eyes without pupils. The crew, not knowing what to do, dump it back into the bay.

As time progresses, the crew never see the Fish Master anymore - he never leaves his cabin, and is incredibly paranoid and irritable whenever he's disturbed. They would like to have him replaced, but the resort is too isolated, no civilization for a hundred miles in any direction - no one comes or goes except by twice-monthly sea planes that drop off supplies and new guests. A couple of the guys swear they see some weird figures lurking by his cabin one night, but they're gone by the time they get close enough to see.

And then, one morning, the Fish Master is suddenly back at the dock, preparing the crew boat to go fishing. The morning shift are too shocked to say anything but whisper curiously amongst themselves. The Fish Master has prepared a specific kind of bait, and as he heads out into the bay, knows exactly where he's going. He reaches the spot, carefully ties his bait onto the line, and sinks it to the bottom of the ocean. And then, he waits. And then, there's a tug. And a moment later, his line is jerked violently, pulling both the rod and the Fish Master over the side of the boat, and down to the very bottom of the sea. His thoughts and guilt and fears and hatreds had finally found a way to reach him, and he'd lost the final confrontation.

Again, yes, pretty dark. But there it is.